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  A few years ago, while I was on magazine assignment in South Africa, my wife got a call from Kenyon. There’d been some bloodletting in the Kenyon English Department, a sudden opening created, a stopgap replacement required. My old classmate, Perry Lentz, had remembered me. Would I like to come for one semester, teach two courses, both in fiction writing, for $15,000? She wasn’t calling to talk it over: she’d already said yes.

  I ended up teaching at Kenyon for chunks of the next three years. It was all ad hoc: I never knew, when I left, if I’d be returning. And closed-ended: no thoughts of tenure-track employment. And part-time: two courses per semester instead of the usual three. This is my fourth return trip. I’m staying all year this time, teaching one course of fiction writing, fall semester, one course of something called “American Literature since 1945” in the spring. And I am going to write about Kenyon, which, it occurs to me, is a lot like writing about your parents while they are still alive and tinkering with their will.

  Kenyon’s president, Phil Jordan, was equivocal when I first described this project to him: “a year in the life of a liberal arts college, a lively, knowledgeable, pungent, top-to-bottom examination of the dynamics, the character, the traditions, tensions and pretensions, predicaments and prospects of one of America’s least examined, least understood institutions.” And so forth. He wasn’t wowed. He wondered what good could come of it at a time when higher education is under heightening criticism. He also worried that my poking around might cause local discomfiture. Kenyon, like all colleges, is dedicated to critical inquiry, free speech, open dialogue, the play of ideas. It is also, like other colleges, thin-skinned and image-conscious, a jealous guardian of its own self-esteem. Never mind, there’s no resisting an idea whose time has come. Even a dangerous idea. And in the months since we talked, the news about higher education has gotten worse. Costs are rising, salaries lagging, enrollments declining, test scores dropping. Admissions departments are in turmoil, professors are mud-wrestling over what to teach, and college presidents are fending off federal price-fixing charges. Add multiculturalism and political correctness to the list. “Nothing feels settled anymore,” an article in the New York Times declared a few weeks ago. The headline: “Higher Education Feels the Heat.” I can’t blame Phil Jordan for having his doubts; I’ve got some doubts myself.

  The choice of college is the most extraordinarily uninformed decision otherwise bright people make. If they bought a house for the same money—$100,000, say, though education’s going up faster than real estate—they’d check out title search, termite inspection, public schools, property taxes, roof, cellar. With colleges, it’s a glossy brochure, a walk around campus in good weather, and a hearsay reputation that’s thirty years out of date. That’s my first audience, I told Jordan, the parents you see touring the liberal arts gulag with their kids, prospective students, all nods and grins, shopping colleges with little more information than you can get about the average kennel: “This is the cage, this is the run, we walk them twice a day, our pets are happy here.” There’s another group I’ll be writing for, more elusive, but I know they’re out there. I’ve seen that distant smile that appears on the face of the $300,000-a-year executive when he hears I teach at a small private college in the country. I’ve seen that killer polish recede, if only for a moment, and yield to something much older, or younger: “I’ve always thought about going back and teaching.” I hear what they are hearing, choral songs and courtly voices, chapel bells. I can see what they are seeing, classrooms lined with dark wood, white houses with friendly porches, cordial campus paths, years passing in a lively, lovely, resonant place, a place like Kenyon, small but fine, pink and white dogwoods in the springtime, leaf raking and fresh cider in the fall, and I know that, for a moment anyway, I’m envied.

  None of this talk of audiences, ripe and ready, persuaded Kenyon’s president to cooperate so much as that bellwether argument that, one way or another, with or without, there was going to be a book. I couldn’t blame him. I told him, later on, to try not to worry much: I was better than anyone who was more loyal, more loyal than anyone who was better. He laughed at that, his hearty, locally famous laugh—hearty if not necessarily convinced—and promised cooperation. How much cooperation remains to be seen.

  The way a traveler learns a village, I want to know this college. Who runs Kenyon College? How are decisions made? What is the dialectic between the president, the provost, the board of trustees? What about the faculty? Are they scholars? Dedicated teachers? Can they manage being both? Can they get away with being neither? Are they happy campers? Whining mercenaries? How should I picture this island I’m coming to? As a feudal structure, a benign fiefdom? A business? A scholarly kibbutz? A summer camp, a country club, a finishing school?

  What are the customers getting for their money? What about grades, standards, intellectual rigor? Is the customer always right? How hard is it to succeed at Kenyon? How hard is it to fail?

  I want to know what it’s like to be a college professor. Amazingly, every academic novel I’ve read—Pictures from an Institution, The Groves of Academe, A New Life—has been about personal crisis or marital politics. There’s never a classroom scene, a student dropping by to manipulate a grade, a lecture that went from good to bad to good again, a seminar that was a three-hour march through a mountain range of ups and downs. And where’s the one scene that goes right to the heart of college life, its bane, its cross, its mainstay: the mind-numbing, migraine-making reading and grading of one, two, three War and Peace–size piles of student prose?

  The students. I want to know what it’s like for them, to get as close as I can to answering the ultimate question: What does it feel like to be you? I’ve no kids of my own, and I’m not complaining. The $20,000 I’ve gotten for my most recent book, years of work, just matched what it would cost to send an offspring to Kenyon. For one year. Still, I wonder about the Kenyon students who occupy my old premises, the people who will be in their prime when I am old. What do they know? What do they care about? What is funny to them? Do they crave excellence? Fear mediocrity? Do all-nighters? Do any of the things that matter to me matter to them?

  Maybe it’ll be a quiet year in Gambier, but I doubt it. As sure as shit and feathers on a chicken coop floor, there’s always something. There are underlying dramas in admissions and money-raising, there’s deep-dish Kremlinology about the plans and ambitions of the president and provost. There are student uproars: date rape, fraternities, and all. There’s the melodrama of hiring searches. Add all this to the real work of the college, the teaching and the learning, and if you don’t have the makings of a movie you’re certainly assured of a long-running television show, something between “Night Court” and “Northern Exposure.”

  Now we come into Mount Vernon, seat of Knox County, Ohio, the town to Kenyon’s gown. Just a few miles more. With its cobbled brick street, Civil War monument town square, block after block of handsome turn-of-the-century housing, Mount Vernon would be a chic place if it were in reach of a major city. It would be Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Kenyon might be Williams, Williams with a lusty $333 million endowment, compared to Kenyon’s piddling $35 million. Kenyon would be Williams, sure, and every go-go girl would be a ballerina. Never mind: we try harder, maybe, sometimes. Meanwhile, Mount Vernon is another town where growth and decline seem tenuously balanced, its downtown Main Street subverted by an ugly, edge-of-town gamut of supermarkets, discount stores, fast-food franchises. Hometown of Paul Lynde, boasts Mount Vernon, another American city that defines itself by the ones who leave. And yet, there is something congenial about the place: stately houses, modest bungalows, backyard gardens, quiet streets, a sense of late summer torpor, terminal and full. Better this than prosperity, which would spell video dishes outside of mobile homes, subdivisions in cornfields, and a new, newer, newest shopping center on the outskirts of town.

  Outside of Mount Vernon, Route 229 goes uphill, past a few showy mansions, old money and new, past a retire
ment home for Masonic women, past bungalows and cornfields, the same landscape we’ve been driving through for hours, but I am so close now I couldn’t be more stirred if, time warping, I were somehow crunching over the gravel in my parents’ driveway and it was thirty years ago and they were outside on a late summer weekend, my mother in the garden weeding. Days after rain were good days for weeding, she said. And he’d be on the stoop, relaxing after spading the garden, a short, barrel-chested man with a Ballantine Ale in his hand, wearing a pair of shorts with boxer-style underwear beneath, and the underwear always was an inch longer than the shorts. That neighborhood is gone now. Coming to Kenyon is as close as I can get to coming home. Like salmon to spawning stream, like eagle to nest, like dog to vomit, I return.

  Now I’ve come to the crest of a hill, and, across a valley where cornfields curve along the Kokosing River and an old railroad trestle hides in trees, I see the college hill and race toward it. At the entrance, a sizable marker, donated by a trustee, names the college and displays its coat of arms. “The tomb of the unknown college,” students call it. We turn up the hill, turn left at the top, arrive in the parking lot outside the freshman dormitory, Lewis Hall, the same dorm I lived in thirty-two years ago. My wife steps out of the jeep. Max jumps gingerly onto the ground. Suddenly, as we head toward the dormitory door, vintage fears assert themselves.

  “Got a guy here sneaking a woman into the dorm,” I imagine someone saying. It’s the same off-duty farmer I pictured down the road, right across the county line, or his brother. Only now he wears the uniform of campus security. His arrival is SWAT-like, with flashing lights and crackling intercoms. “What’s your name?”

  “P. F Kluge . . . class of ‘64.”

  “Her name?”

  “Pamela Hollie.” The security guard’s pause stretches into an embarrassing silence. A Knox County sheriff’s vehicle pulls in beside the security guard’s jeep. And lights snap on in the faculty house across the way. Who lives there, I ask myself. Joan Slonczewski, Biology Department. Writes feminist science fiction. Great!

  “Look, we’re married,” I hear myself saying. I glare at my wife, as an old irritation revives. “Legally married. She kept her name.” God, I don’t mind women getting a fair shake, honest, only why did I have to be in the first generation to live through it?!

  “No women in the dorms,” my nemesis repeats. Down the road—it’s hard to be sure—I see a couple people walking a pair of dogs. Untrained dogs, straining at the leash, spotting Max and pulling Kenyon’s president and his wife toward the scene of the crime.

  But no. I open the door, and the long corridor, freshly waxed, awaits me. My wife and my dog and I walk down the hall, and the building swallows us.

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  Prologue: 1976

  BILLY HOOVER

  Everybody knew a student was missing. They’d been searching for days, searching all over—cops driving country roads, teachers and classmates walking through cornfields, combing the woods. They walked along the river, poked around abandoned sheds and trailers. Every cow pond, gravel pit, every dumpster got looked into. And, each day that passed, people got a little more scared. Scared of finding. Scared of not finding.

  I heard about it from my uncle, Tom Hoover, who worked in College Security. My father had died the year before, my mother was “failing,” as they say around here. She went down real fast after my father died. A lively, healthy woman—the talker in the family—turned thin and silent. I’ll never know about her fall down the steps of our house, which she’d walked down thousands of times before, whether it was an accident or not. The end of her failing, that’s what it was. That happened a few months before the student disappeared and Tom was there for me, getting me new clothes for eighth grade, taking me fishing, hunting, out for pizza. Some nights, he took me to work at the college—patrolling parties, keeping drinkers out of cars, escorting girl students home from the library at midnight. That was my first taste of college.

  I remember wondering about that missing student, not just where he went, but why. For me, lost meant misplaced: lost keys, lost ball, lost and found. Not like lost at sea, lost in combat, lost forever. Even the posters that were all over town— at the bank, the post office, the grocery and gas station—though they were supposed to show who folks were looking for, seemed more like messages meant for the student himself, telling him that people missed him and it was time to come home now, please.

  My home was—and still is—a farm just across the river from the college, which sits up on a wooded hill. My father always told me I was lucky to be born where I was, in this part of Ohio, in this particular place. Not everybody had a famous college in walking distance. That brought some quality to life, he said. Some magic. Just look at it, he used to say, pointing up at the hill. Like a castle. Or a monastery. Or a space station, shooting signals out into the stars. High and mighty talk coming from a college maintenance guy who plowed snow and scattered salt in winter, mulched leaves in autumn, cut grass in summer and spring. There were plenty locals who took potshots at the college, at spoiled kids and snobby faculty and presidents who...as my Uncle Tom put it...thought their shit didn’t stink. But, low rank as he was, my father believed in that place and what he believed in was good enough for me.

  It was Indian Summer that day, a kindly warm spell after a killing frost. The October heat was a surprise. Flies were buzzing, crows circled overhead and—just when the wind was right—I could hear the announcer at the home football game, the college taking yet another pounding. Our local high school team could beat them, folks said. I sat awhile on a railroad trestle, walked along the river, then set off uphill, into the woods, into a neighbor’s orchard that smelled like cider, drunken bees feasting on windfall apples. I followed a deer trail back onto our place into a bumper crop of blackberry bushes, sumac, scrub oak and maple, a field that hadn’t been planted for years. My father wasn’t out to shake the last penny out of the ground. Leave something for the deer, he said, the wild turkeys, the raccoons and the possums.

  Leave something for the crows. They were all over an empty barn at the edge of the field, up against the woods. My dad used the barn for wood, dismantling it a board at a time, when he was building benches and tables for professors who liked that weathered, broken-in-look in their garden furniture. The crows had found it now, swarming around the place, cawing like crazy, circling overhead. I walked towards them, through dry grass and brambles, floating through that last warm sunlight, late in the day, late in the season.

  The smell hit me, slugged me, before I saw where it was coming from. Something hanging inside the barn, hanging at the end of a rope looped over a beam at the edge of the hay loft. A week had passed since the student vanished, a week of warm days since the crows had found him, turning him slowly as they landed and took off but never deserting him completely, one or another always in contact, never leaving the dead kid alone, never backing off to admire their work. I folded down on my knees, gagging and vomiting. The crows knew I was there but that didn’t bother them. I chucked a handful of stones at them. That didn’t bother them much. They lifted off the corpse, letting me see their work in progress. The eyes were gone, the ears, the tongue, cheeks, everything that made a face. All the easy pickings. When I saw that, when I looked down at where trousers had split open, where like kids pulling ribbons off a gift, the crows tugged at intestines, I screamed and ran. It was him alright, the lost student. I couldn’t believe it, that I was the one to find him. I hadn’t even been looking. As soon as I hit the trail that runs along the river, I saw Tom Hoover walking towards me. He always was able to find me, whenever I needed him, and now I threw myself into his arms, crying. “I know,” Tom said. “I know.” He told me I should stay put a minute and he headed for the barn. I could see him shudder when the smell hit him but that didn’t stop him. He stepped inside, stayed a minute and came back to me. “Spoiled,” he said. “Spoiled rotten.”
He held me and hugged me, the way he did the day they found my father in the river. “There’s a reward,” he said.

  The reward was a hundred dollars. But it was more than money. It was death. The smell of road kill got me, ever since. The sight of anything hanging the way that dead boy had hung. A deer on the first day of hunting season, hung from a branch, gutted and bled. A piñata thing at a Mexican party. That was my reward. A gift that kept on giving. A role to play, a part in life. I was the one who found the bodies. Or they found me.

  Part One

  Orientation

  1999

  Chapter I

  WARREN NILES

  Night Thoughts of a College President

  Next year, the last of my twenty years here, will doubtless be filled with tributes and farewells of all kinds. Much, I’m sure, will be made of me. That is why I have chosen this penultimate year for a long-contemplated project: my journal, my reflections on my tenure as president and what it means, or meant. I do this for my own pleasure, yet not without hope that this summing up, carefully placed and well published, might be of interest to others.

  I look forward to writing this. For years I’ve had a notebook with Night Thoughts of a College President written on the cover and nothing within. What a joke it would have been if I had died and someone going through my possessions, the college archivist perhaps, had come across those unwritten pages. It would have confirmed what many have suspected: that behind those suave presidential walls, an empty lot reposed. But now, at last, I commence.